Housing policy

Homeownership has been declining in favour of private renting in most developed English speaking countries since the early-2000s. Public debates in countries like Britain, Australia and the US have subsequently focused on the ostensible coming of age of ‘generation rent’, constituted of younger individuals excluded from home buying and traditional routes to housing asset accumulation. While the focus of this paper is the significance of access to housing assets as a means to offset potential economic and welfare precarity, our concern is landlords rather than tenants. Drawing on British survey data we show that the rental boom has been accompanied by increasing multiple property ownership among classes of largely middle-aged and relatively affluent households. Over one-million small-time landlords have emerged in the last decade alone, who, we argue, are part product of historic developments in housing markets and welfare states. Generations of British have not only been orientated towards their homes as commodity assets, they have also begun to mobilize around multi-property accumulation in a context of shifting welfare and pension expectations.

This paper contributes to current debates by reframing recent transformations in housing, policy and property equity in terms of a transfigured asset-based welfare regime. The analysis thereby advances earlier, more descriptive evaluations of asset-based welfare and challenges suggestions that its relevance has faded since the global financial crisis. We argue, drawing on the UK as a case with broad international salience, that the home has become even more central as an asset base of individual welfare since the global financial crisis, yet under distorted conditions of access and distribution, with housing wealth polarisation undermining financial inclusion and welfare security more broadly.

The paper distinguishes three phases of social housing policy in Vienna: a first phase in the 1920s, which laid the foundations for the sector as part of the political experiments with municipal socialism; a second phase, from the 1950s onwards, in which social housing policy became incorporated into the national Keynesian welfare state; a third phase, since the 1980s, in which the sector is exposed to mounting neo-liberal pressure. The paper discusses for each phase the key ideas behind social housing policies, as well as the main measures and instruments towards the sector. Also, it reflects on the sector’s effectiveness to address existing urban housing problems and points out who remained excluded.

Welfare-state restructuring featuring the use of equity held in owner-occupied housing assets to offset declining public welfare resources and diminishing pension reserves – a form of ‘homeownership-based welfare’– has become increasingly prominent in many developed economies in recent decades. This paper, focusing on the UK, examines the shifting position of homeownership, arguing that while the private home has become a key component of welfare restructuring, both owner-occupation and housing equity have become more polarised in the last decade, especially across cohorts. A particular concern is whether passive homeownership-based welfare switching strategies have become more active, or even pro-active, strategies to housing property accumulation as a means to compensate for welfare state retrenchment and anticipated pension shortfalls leading up to and since the Global Financial Crisis. We identify the significance of the rapid advance of a ‘generation landlord’ in the recent development of ‘generation rent’.

Urban inequality

While public programmes, rent controls and subsidy schemes have not resolved New York’s historic and long-standing housing crisis, they have been important in dampening the housing problems of low-income New Yorkers. Along with an encroaching neo-liberal hegemony, however, since the 1990s redistributive policies have come under growing pressure. This article focuses on the neo-liberal restructuring of the city’s rental market and the effects on housing affordability. First, we outline the most crucial reforms and policy changes, at various scales, that have impacted the rental market in recent decades. Second, we demonstrate, using survey data, how reforms have affected the rental market structure before assessing how supply changes have affected affordability. We find that policy reforms have led to a reduction in inexpensive rental units in the city, reshaping patterns of affordability among different income groups, with particularly negative outcomes for low-income households, specifically among Black and Minority Ethnic Groups.

Among West European cities, Vienna stands out as a case that has developed a particularly large de-commodified housing stock over the 20th century. The city’s housing model has also shown greater stability against wider re-commodification trends since the 1980s. This paper centres on two policy changes since the mid-1990s: first, the local government has ceased to provide council housing and is now entirely relying on non-profit associations for the provision of social rental housing. Second, the national government has liberalized rent regulation in the private rental market. The first part of the paper introduces these changes, discusses how they represent steps towards greater market influence and how they put pressure on de-commodified housing, particularly since the mid-2000s. The second part argues that the reforms have initiated a dualization trend among low-income households, forging a division between market insiders and outsiders. The third part reflects whether the policy changes mean that Vienna is also increasingly incorporated into broader re-commodification trends. We argue that substantial de-commodification policies have remained in place, although they have been severely weakened by re-commodification attempts. Representations of Vienna as an exceptional case without significant re-commodification, however, should be questioned.

With a comparably high degree of de-commodification in the urban housing market, Amsterdam has been long considered a prime example of a ‘European city’ and a ‘just city’. This paper looks at how the city’s housing tenure sectors have changed since the 1990s due to neo-liberalisation processes and specifies effects for housing conditions of the poor. It highlights how restructuring has been driven by policy changes at different scales, and analyses the effects of reform on issues of accessibility and affordability. We identify a gap between insiders and outsiders, with affordability for the poor inside the system not yet deteriorating, but accessibility for poor outsiders emerging as a key problem. In the conclusion we speculate on future developments of the Amsterdam housing market and relate our findings to debates about the ‘European city’ and the ‘just city’.

Market-based reforms have played important parts in restructuring urban housing sectors in recent decades and have increasingly marginalised or excluded lower income groups, especially in the so-called ‘global cities’ where market pressures have been strongest. While accounts of housing policy and market transformations in cities are not uncommon, existing studies demonstrate a strong North American bias. Moreover, comparative analyses have so far been rare. In this paper, neoliberal transformations in housing practices and conditions are examined in three highly differentiated and contrasting cities from three different continents: New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo. The analysis demonstrates remarkable variegation in the manifestation of neoliberalisation of housing as well as considerable path dependency in terms of housing policies, practices and market restructuring. What becomes evident is that both symbolic and de facto erosion of the ‘right to the city’ for low-income residents, while a relatively ubiquitous outcome of housing marketisation, is strongly mediated by local housing practices, structural constraints and policy legacies and regimes.

While pension systems, unemployment benefits and health care have received ample
attention in the welfare state literature, housing arguably has not. Indeed, housing has for a long time been strikingly missing from most studies of the welfare state, not least from Esping-Andersen’s (1990) seminal ‘worlds of welfare’typology. For Torgersen (1987), this lack of coverage is related to the relatively low degree of de-commodification in post-war housing systems compared to other welfare spheres in Europe.

The concept of polycentricity has gained significance in discussions on spatial development in Europe in recent years. This paper presents new evidence on polycentric city networks in Central-Eastern Europe based on selected results of the ESPON project POLYCE (Metropolisation and Polycentric Development in Central Europe). The authors discuss existing applications of the concept in the context of EU spatial policies and present an exploratory analysis of relational polycentricity focused on international networks of firms and research co-operation between seven capital cities in Central-Eastern Europe (Vienna, Bratislava, Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest and Ljubljana). Analysis of networks of firms in the advanced producer service sector reveals strong ties between Budapest, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw, with Berlin beingless connected but hosting firm subsidiaries of higher order. The investigations on research networks within EU Research Framework Programmes demonstrate that Berlin and Vienna play dominant roles in research co-operation within theregion and are also well integrated in European scientific communities. There is no clear indication that inter-urban firmand research networks are influenced by travel times or ethnic ties between the cities, but the similar structures of firmand research relations suggest that different kinds of interactions, networks and co-operation between cities often go hand in hand with each other and are connected in some way.